How to Identify Your Target Audience and Market Effectively Online

Despite the fact that the pandemic brought the entire world to its knees, about 60% of business owners foster positive emotions towards how their ventures will emerge from it.  

A lot has changed in the past year, which is evident through cursory market research. One of the trends to become a part of the new normal revolves around service personalisation. 

A staggering 91% of buyers are ready to shop from a brand that offers them personalised recommendations. However, personalisation is only possible through customer segmentation and targeting.

Businesses need to understand their target audience to make this happen.

Through this post, we will learn about the concept of a target audience and how to market to them effectively.

Who is Your Target Audience?

Your target audience is a set of intended benefactors of your sales and marketing efforts. What you assume as your target audience acts as a baseline to guide you towards comprehending the nature and interests of the customers you need to pursue. You may think of them as your ideal customers that offer maximum customer lifetime value (CLV).  

How to Identify Your Target Audience 

Understanding who your target audience is requires ample audience research to shortlist a set of characteristics that align with your business objectives. For instance, if you are in the business of selling baby food, women who have recently given birth would be your target audience.  

However, recognising your target audience is not always this intuitive or obvious. Here is what you need to bear in mind to identify target audience: 

Take Stock of Existing Customers

Take a look at your loyal customers. The fact that they are advocating for your product or service indicates that what you have to offer adds value to their lives. As such, they are already a prototype of your target audience! 

Observe the common threads that bind these clients to gain more insight into your target audience’s characteristics. Typically, a recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) analysis can help you shortlist and capitalise on the shared features. 

Rely on Customer Data

Speaking of commonalities, you can use factors like age, location, gender, marital status, education level, occupation, income level, ethnicity, etc., to segment your clients. It allows you to paint a picture of what your target audience would look like depending upon a set of variables. 

For a more granular approach, you can also include psychographic data of your customers, such as interests, hobbies, beliefs, values, personality, behaviour, attitude, etc. Set these features aside as your target audience’s characteristics. 

Reverse the Point of View 

Rather than thinking as an organisation, position yourself as a user who can benefit from your product or services. The role reversal will offer perspective on how you can harvest more clients through targeting. 

Identify the pain points and use them to discover the prospective beneficiaries. By determining who derives maximum value by associating with you, you can find ways to attract the right kind of audience. 

READ: 4 Ways to Improve Customer Trust for Your Small Business

Collect Customer Feedback 

Customer inputs in the form of reviews, surveys, and feedback can be the foundation for understanding, “Who is the target audience?” The leads that convert are naturally more inclined to transform into long-term paying customers, hence, their opinion should matter to your business. And while you’re at it, you need to monitor them closely to identify any trends. 

Tips on Marketing to Your Target Audience 

By now, it may be evident that marketing to targeted audiences is way easier than broadcasting to the general public. Here are a few additional tips on marketing to your target audience: 

• Create relevant and useful content to connect with your target audience. The content format plays a vital role in determining how you market to them. 
• You need a marketing platform that resonates with your target audience. For example, if it lies in the 18-25 age demographic, you would see greater success over social channels. 

• Rope in influencers as they are an integral part of niche communities and have more credibility. Influencer marketing can be an excellent medium to increase your reach and standing amongst your target audience. 
• Leverage referral marketing to encourage your customers to do your work of hunting down new customers. You can even use it to break into target audience segments that you didn’t know you can tap.  
• Since you have already broken down your ideal customer into a set of characteristics, use it to your advantage to run targeted ad campaigns across multiple channels. 
• Use the right business platform. If you’re a consultancy agency, opt for a business website. If you’re an online store, then build an ecommerce store. If you’re in the F&B business, get a website and app. If you are a store in Australia, consider TLD domains .com.au. It’s important to choose the right platform that suits your business’s needs.

RECOMMENDED: 6 Website Builder Tips to Optimise Your Site and Boost Conversions

Start planning now! 

You now have the ability to identify who your target audience is and how to capture them. Plan your marketing strategy wisely, and you will notice a significant improvement on your end. 

But if you don’t know where to start, we have a free online course on how to establish an online presence from scratch.